Who's Christian, who's saved, will be judged by God at Judgment.
Meantime, in this world of thieves and liars, any of us can believe whatever delusion permits.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Atheism
The real question shouldn't be whether or not God exists. (God is too undefined a concept for the question to be meaningful anyway.) The better question is: Does truth matter? Does reality play a role in human destiny? Or can we just lie and defraud and get away with it forever?
The real question shouldn't be whether Jesus existed as a real person in history; a better question is whether or not civilization has ever bent its rules to sabotage a reformer. The following question must then also be asked: did civilization break its own laws to sabotage a reformer once? or are cheating and torture standard features of human super-groups?
Churches hawk salvation while joining society (followers leading and leaders following) in undermining the intelligence that might otherwise help us to survive. It isn't just the Temple that Jesus was prevented from being understood at; he would have been crucified had he gone to the university, or if he had performed his cures in the parking lot of the hospital: while inside the doctors were trying to get $30,000 per hour for procedures that kill as often as they help.
The real question shouldn't be whether Jesus existed as a real person in history; a better question is whether or not civilization has ever bent its rules to sabotage a reformer. The following question must then also be asked: did civilization break its own laws to sabotage a reformer once? or are cheating and torture standard features of human super-groups?
Churches hawk salvation while joining society (followers leading and leaders following) in undermining the intelligence that might otherwise help us to survive. It isn't just the Temple that Jesus was prevented from being understood at; he would have been crucified had he gone to the university, or if he had performed his cures in the parking lot of the hospital: while inside the doctors were trying to get $30,000 per hour for procedures that kill as often as they help.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Meta-Theology
I love to imagine that god, as awareness, existed before man emerged with his own version of sentience. I like to push that back and imagine god as aware of the commencement of this universe. How far can we push it? Was god aware when the cosmos began: if the cosmos can be thought of as having begun. But god's forte doesn't arrive till Judgment. I love to imagine a point in the future where someone, something, some god, will actually think, observe, be aware, and most important: be right!
But, you know, maybe it doesn't really matter. Awareness or non-awareness, god or no god, what actually exists will still actually exist or have actually existed, what's true will be true. If we're a horse's ass it won't matter to the truth what our lawyer says, what fuss the priest makes, what bullshit the media propagate ...
But, you know, maybe it doesn't really matter. Awareness or non-awareness, god or no god, what actually exists will still actually exist or have actually existed, what's true will be true. If we're a horse's ass it won't matter to the truth what our lawyer says, what fuss the priest makes, what bullshit the media propagate ...
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Puppet in the Sky
Is our world a simple consistent system where rules apply? Or is it a product of magical chaoses? where rules don't exist? or they can be bent? where cheating wins?
We don't know. We can't know. We don't know enough to know. We don't know enough to find out. But my bets have long been on the former: though they started out trained to the latter. Don't observe experience, and theorize what the rules must be by some collaboration of rational processes; pray, practice magic, try to cheat.
We "know" our environment by "modeling" it. We build symbolic structures, and, insofar as we are intelligent, interested in survival, compare those models with experience, revising the symbolic structure as necessary. That's a semiotic statement of alternative one above: we live in a simple consistent system: rational processes can try to figure it out. Maybe the system is complex enough that our models won't be quite perfect the first few tries, but edition N of the model should have a good chance of being less flawed than edition M was. That's what man would believe if man were scientific: rational.
But modern man is simply edition O of man C, D, E, the failed magician. Once we wanted to control things, we tried magic. Our magic failed. So we tried specialist magicians. Their magic failed. So we imagined the perfect magician being immaterial, a spirit, and living in the sky: the meta-magician. Our magic is no good, but God's magic is perfect.
Along comes pk. I was born into a magical culture. My emotions developed around love for God, reverence for God, celebration of God, love for God, being the highest good, the highest goal; but slowly, gradually, imperfectly, I came to value reason, science, and to see that my magical society pretended to, but did it magically: as though science were a question of pronouncing Abracadabra right: or the magic wouldn't work. So what I did, what I've tried, is to blend both: believe in science, but keep the old magical vocabulary. Thus pk's semiotic universe uses ancient human vocabulary and grammar to symbolize modern human science and reason. In other words, just as Einstein substituted a rational creator for the magical creator of his Jewish ancestors, so do I, meaning natural law by "god." I define my terms, I practice at consistency: how can I help it if no one understands? when their not understanding is willful: attempts at the old magical control? Reasonable people must be sabotaged: so the priests for irrational magic can run things unopposed. Sabotage didn't work for Einstein, so he got deified. Sabotage has worked just fine for pk: pk being far more revolutionary than Einstein. Einstein merely wanted to transform Newtonian gravity; pk wants to do away with society in which the magicians have free reign to cheat: by running the churches, the state, the schools, the universities ...
Once upon a time the priests tied to make it rain. Too often it didn't rain no matter how they danced or cut themselves, no matter how many virgins they disemboweled, chanting in no matter which language. Then the priests saw the lightning hit the mistletoe way up in the oak tree. Then it rained> Ah! So it's the mistletoe that is beloved of the big magician in the sky. Now: how do we, who cannot control the rain, control the big magician in the sky? and therefore control the rain?
Through precise rituals in Hebrew! Through precise rituals in Greek! Through precise rituals in Latin! (or Sanskrit!) (How about IndoEuropean?) (It's still no good: IndoEuropean is a current (set of) language(s), not at all an ancient language.) (We don't know any truly ancient languages! the evidence is rubbed clean.)
Anyway, here we have a bunch of failed magicians, now called rabbis (translate as "priests"), convincing themselves that they have lured their creation god into the box where they keep their contract with this magician in the sky, which they call their Covenant, and the box the Covenant's "ark": the Ark of the Covenant. The Jews tell themselves, and anyone who's listening, borrowing, imitating, that the box is for the God's comfort, and protection: the people feed and care for their god. But anyone not quite buying everything they say not quite literally can suppose that they might just have lured the god into the box to hold him captive and make him behave: that is, to make the sun rise and the rain rain for the Jews: and make their enemies tremble and fall in the dust.
(French Christians followed this behavior almost exactly when they erected their Chartres Cathedral: only in the European case it was the female spirt Mary the French were trying to lure and capture: mitigating the furious judgment of her male counterpart Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
And in the US, on Morningside Heights, across the street from Riverside Cathedral, in the 1960s was erected a limestone pile called by locals the God Box. It's Church of England (Roman Catholic with the Pope (and his wops) washed out), diluted to Anglican (the British washed out): sort of generic American Protestant (Christian with the religion washed out). It's not altogether clear what American Christians want: sort of Forgiveness: while they keep the money.)
We don't know. We can't know. We don't know enough to know. We don't know enough to find out. But my bets have long been on the former: though they started out trained to the latter. Don't observe experience, and theorize what the rules must be by some collaboration of rational processes; pray, practice magic, try to cheat.
We "know" our environment by "modeling" it. We build symbolic structures, and, insofar as we are intelligent, interested in survival, compare those models with experience, revising the symbolic structure as necessary. That's a semiotic statement of alternative one above: we live in a simple consistent system: rational processes can try to figure it out. Maybe the system is complex enough that our models won't be quite perfect the first few tries, but edition N of the model should have a good chance of being less flawed than edition M was. That's what man would believe if man were scientific: rational.
But modern man is simply edition O of man C, D, E, the failed magician. Once we wanted to control things, we tried magic. Our magic failed. So we tried specialist magicians. Their magic failed. So we imagined the perfect magician being immaterial, a spirit, and living in the sky: the meta-magician. Our magic is no good, but God's magic is perfect.
Along comes pk. I was born into a magical culture. My emotions developed around love for God, reverence for God, celebration of God, love for God, being the highest good, the highest goal; but slowly, gradually, imperfectly, I came to value reason, science, and to see that my magical society pretended to, but did it magically: as though science were a question of pronouncing Abracadabra right: or the magic wouldn't work. So what I did, what I've tried, is to blend both: believe in science, but keep the old magical vocabulary. Thus pk's semiotic universe uses ancient human vocabulary and grammar to symbolize modern human science and reason. In other words, just as Einstein substituted a rational creator for the magical creator of his Jewish ancestors, so do I, meaning natural law by "god." I define my terms, I practice at consistency: how can I help it if no one understands? when their not understanding is willful: attempts at the old magical control? Reasonable people must be sabotaged: so the priests for irrational magic can run things unopposed. Sabotage didn't work for Einstein, so he got deified. Sabotage has worked just fine for pk: pk being far more revolutionary than Einstein. Einstein merely wanted to transform Newtonian gravity; pk wants to do away with society in which the magicians have free reign to cheat: by running the churches, the state, the schools, the universities ...
Once upon a time the priests tied to make it rain. Too often it didn't rain no matter how they danced or cut themselves, no matter how many virgins they disemboweled, chanting in no matter which language. Then the priests saw the lightning hit the mistletoe way up in the oak tree. Then it rained> Ah! So it's the mistletoe that is beloved of the big magician in the sky. Now: how do we, who cannot control the rain, control the big magician in the sky? and therefore control the rain?
Through precise rituals in Hebrew! Through precise rituals in Greek! Through precise rituals in Latin! (or Sanskrit!) (How about IndoEuropean?) (It's still no good: IndoEuropean is a current (set of) language(s), not at all an ancient language.) (We don't know any truly ancient languages! the evidence is rubbed clean.)
Anyway, here we have a bunch of failed magicians, now called rabbis (translate as "priests"), convincing themselves that they have lured their creation god into the box where they keep their contract with this magician in the sky, which they call their Covenant, and the box the Covenant's "ark": the Ark of the Covenant. The Jews tell themselves, and anyone who's listening, borrowing, imitating, that the box is for the God's comfort, and protection: the people feed and care for their god. But anyone not quite buying everything they say not quite literally can suppose that they might just have lured the god into the box to hold him captive and make him behave: that is, to make the sun rise and the rain rain for the Jews: and make their enemies tremble and fall in the dust.
(French Christians followed this behavior almost exactly when they erected their Chartres Cathedral: only in the European case it was the female spirt Mary the French were trying to lure and capture: mitigating the furious judgment of her male counterpart Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
And in the US, on Morningside Heights, across the street from Riverside Cathedral, in the 1960s was erected a limestone pile called by locals the God Box. It's Church of England (Roman Catholic with the Pope (and his wops) washed out), diluted to Anglican (the British washed out): sort of generic American Protestant (Christian with the religion washed out). It's not altogether clear what American Christians want: sort of Forgiveness: while they keep the money.)
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Theology
One hundred percent of pk theology is human theology. Some may be divinely inspired, some may be naturally inspired, some may be human inspired, but it's still human theology, thought by me, counter-thought by me (and maybe others). As far as I can tell the same is true of all the theology I've ever heard or heard of; though some claim otherwise. For example, the Jews say they get their idea that they, the Jews, are God's Chosen People from God. That is, the Jews make this claim based on their oral and written tradition. But does that really pass muster as being from God? Aren't' alternate explanations possible? Couldn't they, or anyone, be deluding themselves?
I don't say it's not true: I say we haven't heard it from God. It's not beyond challenge.
Never mind, I've made points like this all my life, to no avail. Let me skip straight to what's galling me today:
Last night I watched Alien 3, squirming and retching. Ripley and her perennial alien visit a prison planet run by fundamentalist Christian convicts, men who claim to be soldiers of Christ. Of course we have only their claim. Christ remains unheard from, at least on that subject, at least in the two hour confines of that bit of meretricious tripe. Same with all Christianity, isn't it? When do we get to hear the Christian accepted as Christian by God? by Christ? by Jesus?
Will it be at the same time we get to hear that the Jews are God's Chosen People from God?
Similarly, I hear the government claim to be of the people, for the people; but I don't hear it from the people. Oh, I hear it from the schooled, from the brain washed. I'd like to hear it from a couple of hundred million plus individuals, any one of which could pass my Turing Test!
Theology: human sentience speculating on a-human sentience (as well as cause-and-effect): pre-human sentience, pre-universe sentience, pre-cosmos sentience (are these nonsense categories?) ... meta-sentience ...
I don't say it's not true: I say we haven't heard it from God. It's not beyond challenge.
Never mind, I've made points like this all my life, to no avail. Let me skip straight to what's galling me today:
Last night I watched Alien 3, squirming and retching. Ripley and her perennial alien visit a prison planet run by fundamentalist Christian convicts, men who claim to be soldiers of Christ. Of course we have only their claim. Christ remains unheard from, at least on that subject, at least in the two hour confines of that bit of meretricious tripe. Same with all Christianity, isn't it? When do we get to hear the Christian accepted as Christian by God? by Christ? by Jesus?
Will it be at the same time we get to hear that the Jews are God's Chosen People from God?
Similarly, I hear the government claim to be of the people, for the people; but I don't hear it from the people. Oh, I hear it from the schooled, from the brain washed. I'd like to hear it from a couple of hundred million plus individuals, any one of which could pass my Turing Test!
Theology: human sentience speculating on a-human sentience (as well as cause-and-effect): pre-human sentience, pre-universe sentience, pre-cosmos sentience (are these nonsense categories?) ... meta-sentience ...
Judge Not
Judge not, lest ye be judged, says the Bible. But we judge all the time!
So do I, and I don't apologize for it; but I don't practice it while pretending that I don't believe in it.
I've meant to say the following at Knatz.com for many years now. I'll just slap it here, then gather more around the seed pebble later:
The French have pretended to be Christian on more than one occasion throughout more than one millennium. Christians: aren't they known for believing, or at least pretending to believe, that God is the judge? that Christians believe that God should be the judge? not the French? not humans? Then how come the French buried the Marquis de Sade in lime?
The French buried the Marquis de Sade in lime so that de Sade couldn't resurrect! The French didn't want to allow God a chance to judge him: the French had already judged him, so God couldn't be allowed to judge him. (No body, no resurrection; no resurrection, no judgment: according to older superstitions.)
So do I, and I don't apologize for it; but I don't practice it while pretending that I don't believe in it.
I've meant to say the following at Knatz.com for many years now. I'll just slap it here, then gather more around the seed pebble later:
The French have pretended to be Christian on more than one occasion throughout more than one millennium. Christians: aren't they known for believing, or at least pretending to believe, that God is the judge? that Christians believe that God should be the judge? not the French? not humans? Then how come the French buried the Marquis de Sade in lime?
The French buried the Marquis de Sade in lime so that de Sade couldn't resurrect! The French didn't want to allow God a chance to judge him: the French had already judged him, so God couldn't be allowed to judge him. (No body, no resurrection; no resurrection, no judgment: according to older superstitions.)
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Either — Or
Humans talk about intelligence, communication, awareness ... as though they were black and white, either / or. Is the glass that has some water in it full? If it isn't empty is full the only other possibility?
I see intelligence, communication, awareness ... as spectra (as my Thinking Tools said) (see pkTools blog). At the same time I see that my fellows see things, "think" things, in either/or absolutes. God isn't intelligent, he's perfectly intelligent; God isn't aware, he's infallibly aware: can't be wrong, not in one shade of one point.
I see intelligence as evolving. It's development is related to microbial interactions with environment, as it is to the brain stem of tyrannosaurus. Lewis Thomas argued that only those capable of making mistakes, the fallible, can learn: only mistakes can be learned from. Thus any giraffe that falls short of the leaves but that then grows a longer neck, stochastically, over time, the species if not the individual, is potentially more intelligent than any infallible God palmed off (by a very fallible Church). But that's Lewis Thomas, and Darwin, and Gregory Bateson, and me. I don't think Thomas or Darwin or Bateson number among my readers, if indeed my readers have any number at all, other than zero. Thus I revert to the fundamentalism I grew up with, writing for readers that do exist: in absolute, either/or terms.
Either God exists or he doesn't. Don't tell me that there are more choices than two, that the duality is a false one, my readers won't understand it. Either, or. Either God is perfect, or he's not. If God is aware of the fall of a sparrow then God must also be aware of every possible position of every possible electron, positron, photon, neutrino ... Thus God knows every single good thing I've ever done, and every good thing I've tried to do, what I said, and what I meant, and what was done by the society, by my family, by my wife, by my teachers, by my friends, to misunderstand what I said, so that that part of my speaking that tried to convey messages from God, from Jesus, from inspired geniuses such as Bucky Fuller and Ivan Illich will be understood by God, understood perfectly, and so, no matter what God will do to me because of all the bad things I've said, or done, or meant, he'll also know how his messages were sabotaged by the society and its members, its families and its churches and its universities, its media, its governments ...
And therefore, since God can do anything, even make the stones understand Judgment at Judgment, it can only be true that everyone, every stone, every giraffe, every tyrannosaur, every teacher, priest, and moron will, at Judgment, understand what I did and said that they didn't understand in life.
And, finally, I will have succeeded in communication: God doing the heavy lifting, succeeding in the impossible part, in making human intellects understand.
Or not.
Yeah. What if there is no Judgment? What if there will be no understanding? no communication? only the false communications of the priests, the authorities?
What if the slaves, the conquered, the women, the wogs ... finally get "their day in court" only to get steamrolled? What if even in heaven Sutter never gets a dime for the gold and family and cattle and land we stole from him? What if even in heaven Ivan Illich and I get no credit for the internet we invented, trying to save the people from coercion?
Will there be Justice? Or not!
You know, it's like asking whether or not sentience will succeed in evolving in this universe! What the hell. I'm not sure I even care any more.
pk translates: Look at it this way:
It's possible that this universe is the only one, that the beer commercial has it right. There is no karma, no meta-view, no god: just us. We're not a lab experiment, certainly not a lab experiment gone awry; we're the cats pajamas. OK. Then being or trying to be Genghis or Hitler or Stalin or Napoleon makes sense. Achilleus makes sense, Agammemnon makes sense. Jesus and Oedipus and St. Francis are just wacko.
But say on the other hand that this universe might be a petri dish in some god's lab somewhere. The god is running an experiment to see how many petri dishes of the several hundred, or million, he starts with, fifty seeded with one kind of life, fifty with another, fifty left alone, fifty plugged into the god, fifty not plugged in ... will develop sentience: and of those, how many produce kleptocracies, and of those how many produce a Jesus, of those how many listen to Jesus and how many crucify Jesus without learning a thing ... Only a human could be stupid enough to believe that he, the human, is running the experiment! Only a church could be vain enough to believe that once the Jesus is crucified, that then they're the pipeline about the experiment.
pk translates further: only a church, or a government, or a university ... could be stupid enough to believe that they're anything but kleptocratic careerists: unless: their supposed pipeline to the god is entirely open to rational examination by any subject of the kleptocracy! pk translates still further: in other words, the kid who says The Emperor has no clothes by saying The Emperor has no clothes "should" instantly cancel the legitimacy of the kleptocracy. It's not that the kid should become emperor: the kleptocracy should see that there should be no emperor: not the old one, not a new one either.
Or: let the god do whatever he wants, however he wants: it's none of our business. We, I, are not competent even to think about it.
That won't stop us from "thinking"; but does thinking, even by an Einstein, have much more significance than a fly buzzing?
The first draft of this, posted a few days ago, began very differently. I hope this version is better, but the other had some funny devices: so I keep both up.
Obviously what I mean is that being aware somewhere along a spectrum of awareness doesn't prove that you're aware of everything, and certainly not the most important thing. It doesn't even prove that you can know what the most important things are. In Catch-22 Yossarian bandages Snowden's wound aboard the bomber only to discover that 90% of Snowden's guts have meantime been spilling out a huge wound in Snowden's back that Yossarian had no suspicion of. It would be very helpful to human sanity if humans could have charts for other species as well as for whole pantheons of gods in a wide sampling of civilizations or other sentiences on a wide sampling of planets. It's dandy that we find ourselves more aware than a stone or a newt or an orangutan; it's dandy to say that Yahweh is more aware than Baal or that Christ is more aware than Yahweh; but it would be better yet if we could assess awareness of the smart mushrooms on Beta Dingle in the Coal Sack and the awareness of their god, Lacy Spoor, as well: assess it that is without being totally inept in the assessment.
I realize that my obsessions are vanities. The Japanese soldier was raised to believe that the emperor was a sun god (and that the sun was a big deal; not a minor star in a galactic backwater). Stick him on a Pacific Island, and the idiot is still fighting for his immortan emperor in 1950, 1955, 1960 ... No one's fed him, no one's paid him ... He's still fighting.
Or Jesus preaches human messages to a Third World Israel, gobbled down by Imperial Rome: the biggest baddest colonizing kleptocracy in the "ancient" world. Jesus gets arrested, gets convicted, tortured, murdered, the Jews and other Third Worlders standing with their thumb in their ass, pretending not to know him. Next thing you know, other Third Worlders get demoted and swallowed by Napoleon, by Wellington, by Washington, by Stalin ...
Jesus writhes on the cross, his corpse spins in the tomb, there's an ache in heaven ... But is it his fault? Is the emperor's mortality, the abandoned soldier's fault? Maybe: but only a very little: a little nothing compared to the sins of Rome swallowing Jerusalem, or the US swallowing the Pacific ...
I tried to help helpless Jesus to save the "world." I made mistakes, sure. I wasn't always dedicated 24/7. But I was denied resources, cheated, blackballed ... stripped, arrested, tortured, censored ... How is our failure my fault?
I agree that it is my fault: the least part my fault; and the greatest part everyone else's fault.
I see intelligence, communication, awareness ... as spectra (as my Thinking Tools said) (see pkTools blog). At the same time I see that my fellows see things, "think" things, in either/or absolutes. God isn't intelligent, he's perfectly intelligent; God isn't aware, he's infallibly aware: can't be wrong, not in one shade of one point.
I see intelligence as evolving. It's development is related to microbial interactions with environment, as it is to the brain stem of tyrannosaurus. Lewis Thomas argued that only those capable of making mistakes, the fallible, can learn: only mistakes can be learned from. Thus any giraffe that falls short of the leaves but that then grows a longer neck, stochastically, over time, the species if not the individual, is potentially more intelligent than any infallible God palmed off (by a very fallible Church). But that's Lewis Thomas, and Darwin, and Gregory Bateson, and me. I don't think Thomas or Darwin or Bateson number among my readers, if indeed my readers have any number at all, other than zero. Thus I revert to the fundamentalism I grew up with, writing for readers that do exist: in absolute, either/or terms.
Either God exists or he doesn't. Don't tell me that there are more choices than two, that the duality is a false one, my readers won't understand it. Either, or. Either God is perfect, or he's not. If God is aware of the fall of a sparrow then God must also be aware of every possible position of every possible electron, positron, photon, neutrino ... Thus God knows every single good thing I've ever done, and every good thing I've tried to do, what I said, and what I meant, and what was done by the society, by my family, by my wife, by my teachers, by my friends, to misunderstand what I said, so that that part of my speaking that tried to convey messages from God, from Jesus, from inspired geniuses such as Bucky Fuller and Ivan Illich will be understood by God, understood perfectly, and so, no matter what God will do to me because of all the bad things I've said, or done, or meant, he'll also know how his messages were sabotaged by the society and its members, its families and its churches and its universities, its media, its governments ...
And therefore, since God can do anything, even make the stones understand Judgment at Judgment, it can only be true that everyone, every stone, every giraffe, every tyrannosaur, every teacher, priest, and moron will, at Judgment, understand what I did and said that they didn't understand in life.
And, finally, I will have succeeded in communication: God doing the heavy lifting, succeeding in the impossible part, in making human intellects understand.
Or not.
Yeah. What if there is no Judgment? What if there will be no understanding? no communication? only the false communications of the priests, the authorities?
What if the slaves, the conquered, the women, the wogs ... finally get "their day in court" only to get steamrolled? What if even in heaven Sutter never gets a dime for the gold and family and cattle and land we stole from him? What if even in heaven Ivan Illich and I get no credit for the internet we invented, trying to save the people from coercion?
Will there be Justice? Or not!
You know, it's like asking whether or not sentience will succeed in evolving in this universe! What the hell. I'm not sure I even care any more.
pk translates: Look at it this way:
It's possible that this universe is the only one, that the beer commercial has it right. There is no karma, no meta-view, no god: just us. We're not a lab experiment, certainly not a lab experiment gone awry; we're the cats pajamas. OK. Then being or trying to be Genghis or Hitler or Stalin or Napoleon makes sense. Achilleus makes sense, Agammemnon makes sense. Jesus and Oedipus and St. Francis are just wacko.
But say on the other hand that this universe might be a petri dish in some god's lab somewhere. The god is running an experiment to see how many petri dishes of the several hundred, or million, he starts with, fifty seeded with one kind of life, fifty with another, fifty left alone, fifty plugged into the god, fifty not plugged in ... will develop sentience: and of those, how many produce kleptocracies, and of those how many produce a Jesus, of those how many listen to Jesus and how many crucify Jesus without learning a thing ... Only a human could be stupid enough to believe that he, the human, is running the experiment! Only a church could be vain enough to believe that once the Jesus is crucified, that then they're the pipeline about the experiment.
pk translates further: only a church, or a government, or a university ... could be stupid enough to believe that they're anything but kleptocratic careerists: unless: their supposed pipeline to the god is entirely open to rational examination by any subject of the kleptocracy! pk translates still further: in other words, the kid who says The Emperor has no clothes by saying The Emperor has no clothes "should" instantly cancel the legitimacy of the kleptocracy. It's not that the kid should become emperor: the kleptocracy should see that there should be no emperor: not the old one, not a new one either.
Or: let the god do whatever he wants, however he wants: it's none of our business. We, I, are not competent even to think about it.
That won't stop us from "thinking"; but does thinking, even by an Einstein, have much more significance than a fly buzzing?
The first draft of this, posted a few days ago, began very differently. I hope this version is better, but the other had some funny devices: so I keep both up.
Obviously what I mean is that being aware somewhere along a spectrum of awareness doesn't prove that you're aware of everything, and certainly not the most important thing. It doesn't even prove that you can know what the most important things are. In Catch-22 Yossarian bandages Snowden's wound aboard the bomber only to discover that 90% of Snowden's guts have meantime been spilling out a huge wound in Snowden's back that Yossarian had no suspicion of. It would be very helpful to human sanity if humans could have charts for other species as well as for whole pantheons of gods in a wide sampling of civilizations or other sentiences on a wide sampling of planets. It's dandy that we find ourselves more aware than a stone or a newt or an orangutan; it's dandy to say that Yahweh is more aware than Baal or that Christ is more aware than Yahweh; but it would be better yet if we could assess awareness of the smart mushrooms on Beta Dingle in the Coal Sack and the awareness of their god, Lacy Spoor, as well: assess it that is without being totally inept in the assessment.
I realize that my obsessions are vanities. The Japanese soldier was raised to believe that the emperor was a sun god (and that the sun was a big deal; not a minor star in a galactic backwater). Stick him on a Pacific Island, and the idiot is still fighting for his immortan emperor in 1950, 1955, 1960 ... No one's fed him, no one's paid him ... He's still fighting.
Or Jesus preaches human messages to a Third World Israel, gobbled down by Imperial Rome: the biggest baddest colonizing kleptocracy in the "ancient" world. Jesus gets arrested, gets convicted, tortured, murdered, the Jews and other Third Worlders standing with their thumb in their ass, pretending not to know him. Next thing you know, other Third Worlders get demoted and swallowed by Napoleon, by Wellington, by Washington, by Stalin ...
Jesus writhes on the cross, his corpse spins in the tomb, there's an ache in heaven ... But is it his fault? Is the emperor's mortality, the abandoned soldier's fault? Maybe: but only a very little: a little nothing compared to the sins of Rome swallowing Jerusalem, or the US swallowing the Pacific ...
I tried to help helpless Jesus to save the "world." I made mistakes, sure. I wasn't always dedicated 24/7. But I was denied resources, cheated, blackballed ... stripped, arrested, tortured, censored ... How is our failure my fault?
I agree that it is my fault: the least part my fault; and the greatest part everyone else's fault.
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